May 31, 2017

Recent election results in the United States have
spawned a lot of writing about how to protect democracy. Some have proposed
concrete actions, such as marches or campaigns or specific organizations to
join. Others have suggested multiple principles to keep in mind as citizens
respond to the election of a man who may see democracy
as his enemy. Others have begun to build new movements.

A quick overview of some specific tactics to trump tyranny
will show that each tactic has its strengths and weaknesses. Each approach
makes assumptions about democracy that not all accept. The election of a leader
who has not demonstrated a strong public commitment to democracy has led some
to question the democratic form that centers on elections. These questions are
an opening into important reconsiderations of what democracy is all about.

One of the weakest points of democracy in the United States
and many other electoral governments in the global north is the tendency to
understand democracy in abstract terms. Rather than holding leaders accountable
to equality in concrete outcomes or direct responsiveness to citizens’ demands,
the turn towards the general allows leaders to divert governance towards their
own narrow interests.

Many of the recent discussions of democracy in the United
States have responded to the perceived threat of the election of Donald Trump
as President by reviewing key principles of anti-authoritarian action.
Historians, linguists, philosophers, and others have chosen to defend democracy
by a turn towards general principles.

Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny (2017) draws
its lessons from historical study of the rise of the Stalinist centralized
one-party state in 1920s Soviet Union and the rise of fascism in Germany in the
1930s. Some of this history’s lessons are very general. Snyder calls for
courage and for setting a good example for future generations in the years when
citizens do not yet realize we are giving in to authoritarianism. Setting an
example often takes simple forms for Snyder, like making new friends outside your familiar
circles, making eye contact and small talk to break down social barriers,
having personal exchanges face to face, keeping up friendships abroad. Setting
an example also breaks the spell of the status quo, which takes on a vividly
ominous cast in this analysis.

Snyder invites all of us to defend institutions by joining
one you care about, a court or a law or a newspaper or a union. And he asks us
to support the multi-party state by voting, since tyrants prefer to lead the
only party around and work to ensure that a political life for their opponents
will be first difficult and soon impossible. He suggests that it is
particularly important for lawyers and doctors and business leaders and civil
servants to maintain their professional standards and ethics, since tyrants
require that norms and rules be bent and soon broken. Some of this history’s
lessons are clearly cautionary, like ensuring your passport is renewed when
needed, spending more time reading long articles to figure things out for
yourself, and learning alternatives forms of the internet. And Snyder invites
us to create our own ways of speaking and living, rather than repeating what
many others are saying and doing, and to figure things out for ourselves.

He also recommends more openly political actions like
subsidizing investigative journalism, learning about sites that investigate
propaganda campaigns, and joining a couple organizations and supporting others
that defend democracy. He warns against abandoning facts and against dangerous
words, like “extremists” and “terrorists,” many of which are already commonplace
in global discourse. He reminds us that some internet content is there to harm
us. And he asks us to notice the signs of hate, the unofficial graffiti and the
official swastikas, and to take them down rather than get used to them. Strong
emotions like hate are what tyrants need, so interrupting these feelings is an
important way to act.

Snyder advises us to be prepared to say no when the police
and soldiers begin to do irregular things. When the unthinkable arrives, he also
calls for calm in the face of the sudden disaster that seems to require the end
of opposition parties, of checks and balances, of the right to a court trial,
and all those other niceties that tyrants find inconvenient. And he warns that
when paramilitary armed groups supporting a leader begin to collaborate with
the police and soldiers, then the end of democracy has come. By then it is too late
for defensive tactics.

While this frame for defending democracy has clear
implications for the present day experience in the United States, the author
also reminds us that the United
States is not so different from other countries where democracy was
threatened. So while those in the U.S. may feel they are facing unusual
circumstances, history suggests that the problem is commonplace.

The linguist and activist George Lakoff also developed a
list of abstract points for defending democracy, “Ten
Points for Democracy Activists.” Released shortly after Trump took office
in early 2017, Lakoff emphasizes the importance of propaganda and news
media for the brain to focus on the public good rather than policies that
benefit corporations and other narrow interests. Taking a strongly partisan
approach criticizing the political party that took the presidency in the 2016
election, Lakoff emphasizes the power of the majority that in his view lost
control of the electoral process. In his focus on mass media framing practices
as the key to protecting democracy, he follows of the German theorist Jürgen Habermas’ belief that better
communication will solve the problems democracy often seems to have.

Lakoff’s approach does little to confront the long history
of covert and overt violence found in democratic societies, whether Democrats or
Republicans or liberals or conservatives are in office. Women have still worked in inhumane conditions in low-wage sweatshops and slaughterhouses whichever
political party is in the White House. Young Black and Latino and Native men have still been shot and killed by police with
impunity under both white and black presidents. The violent destruction of indigenous structures for caring for the land that the founding fathers put in place and that threaten the health of the land and the water will continue whether President Trump stays in office or is
forced out. The public sphere so central to Habermas’ notion of democracy still
can’t resolve the electoral
government production of unequal social relations. By ignoring the ways
that language
framing hides histories of violence, Lakoff’s general proposals and
Habermasian theory do little to transform business as usual in electoral
democracies.

These general approaches to political tactics claim to
protect electoral democracy understood in a modern liberal frame. By centering politics on electoral practices that have demonstrated a weakness over centuries for structural violence and inequality, both Lakoff and Snyder support a form of
government that entices citizens to submit to a nation-state that protects narrow
interests.

Their generalized approach to democracy may work to prevent
autocracy that benefits individual interests. However, it does little to
promote the general interest over the narrow interests of the government
experts and their corporate benefactors. When will democracy come to mean something
besides persistent inequality?